A remembrance of things Pats

Any fan of professional football who remembers the 1980s must be able to step away from the moment and realize how supremely absurd it is that the New England Patriots will arrive at the Super Bowl as the embodiment of institutional, malevolent, greatness. Those who patiently went through the Steve Grogan/Tony Eason years surely can acknowledge how bizarre it is to think that the Pats are for the last ten years what the Cowboys, the Niners, or the Steelers were to previous decades. And it is strange that it is already ending.

Still cooler than 'Buccaneer Bruce'

I still vividly remember the bad old days. The cartoon character on the helmet (I enjoy Pat Patriot as an ironic throwback in a way I never would as an active corporate logo), and the bright red jerseys. The way they were such a distant fourth behind the Sox, Celts, and Bruins that you would forget about them for most of the year. The bumbling — when not contemptible — ownership. This was a team whose high point was probably this (“Thanks for the oranges, Mayor Bradley!”).

I arrived at college for my freshman year just as Drew Bledsoe and Bill Parcells arrived to start changing the franchise. Around my dorm, as young men do, we figured out our football interests pretty early. There were a lot of fans of NFC East fans, the Jets and the Bills. Admitting my rooting interest was with the Patriots was a lot like saying, “no, actually, I am not interested in football.”

The 1990s were the rough dark before the dawn for New England sports. Some great and promising generations were swept away, and new hopes misfired in all directions. The Pats, true to form, dove deepest. Most of us expected the team would be leaving for St. Louis when it was announced some rich weirdo who had season tickets since 1971 would buy the team. Then they went far out of their way to bring in a coach who’d led the Browns to an underwhelming 36-44 a few years earlier. And in 2001, Bledsoe went down and they threw the keys to a sixth round draft pick.

And what happened next means many different things to lots of people. As you get older, those moments seem to stand out more as guideposts. I missed the Snow Bowl, the divisional match against the Raiders that endures because of different interpretations of the tuck rule, because I had a date with my future wife. I remember having very few expectations about Super Bowl XXXVI, beyond that it would probably be as dispiriting as our earlier misadventures against the Bears and the Packers. I invited said girlfriend over and roasted a chicken, the first time I ever operated an oven, in fact. I was trying to impress her, and wanted to make sure we’d be near a television just in case.

I still don’t quite believe how it worked out, and I can’t quite describe it without resorting to ridiculous mysticism. It felt as if somehow the universe had not only shrugged off its massive indifference to you, an individual in all this, but had somehow begun working for you. And perhaps it was fitting that the Pats, so long the afterthought of the region’s sports scene, would be the first in that string of miraculous years. The Sox break the Shaughnessey’s “Curse,” the Celts return to form (and aged out of it almost instantly), and even the Bruins do their part to complete the sweep.

Things seemed easy for the Patriots for awhile. There were three Super Bowl wins in quick succession, and you started to wonder what the ceiling was. It seemed to take years to come back to earth. What happened in Super Bowl XLII against the Giants was just the worst in a series of playoff catastrophes, each of which comes with the realization that this team that you assumed was blessed, that was born to win, was just as fragile and fleeting as anything else. Perhaps because it has been ten years since that first Super Bowl run, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. For years, the conversation has been about whether or not the Patriots were over. Whether they’d just lost too many pieces, whether Brady is too busy trying to sell men Ugg boots, whether time has simply slipped away.

This whole post-season has been a big agonizing, especially the AFC Championship game. The Pats played terrible, and it was one of those games that make you fear for your health, and wonder about the overall value of fandom at the expense of such agony. But somehow, every bullet fired at them missed. Whatever sense of optimism or expectation we may have had has been long since drummed out of his after these few years, and no one I know expected much from this season. Once again we appreciate how it feels to see your team get this far.

Everyone has known for many years that the window was closing. And it is good to have the memories of those great seasons to remind you that those wilderness years aren’t really as terminal as they felt before 2001. Life, indeed, goes on and remains special in its familiar ways. But… still… just one more time?